"These Images Are Just as Frightening Now"

"There is an aspect of horror that Freud initially called the uncanny. That's where something is familiar enough to be recognizable but weird enough to give you the shivers. The uncanny explains a lot of horror tropes, where you look at something and it's not quite right—like a human face that's decomposing. It's recognizable, but just enough away from normal to scare you. In my lectures, I'll show a slide of a beagle, and I have a series of Photoshopped slides where I keep changing the eyes of the beagle and it gets creepier and creepier, because you recognize that there's something not right about it, and it takes you a second to place it."

Gwynne Watkins at Slate talks with Steven Schlozman about horror movies.